Afterword

cover photo and design by Marcel Antonio

The poem posted on October 12, 2009---"Perennial Failure"---ends this first poetry volume on and from this site, this collection eponymously titled Perennial Measure. Or maybe "Perennial Failure" is the first poem in this collection, should the reader prefer to read backwards in time to the first poem posted on August 12, 2009 ("Perennial Measure").

Here's a backgrounder for those new to this project:

After having written eight online books of poems and an online book of stories written in English, I resumed my online activity in 2009 with blogged poems. The poems were posted here, on this literary blog site, which was put up precisely for that purpose, blogging poems daily---or as was possible---for the completion of another volume.

And that has been achieved, from August to October. And now, this site is moving on: next to appear here will be chapters for a novel, appearing on a one-chapter-a-week basis.

About Perennial Measure, the online book:

On the seventh day of the collection’s writing progress, or subconsciously during the composition of the collection’s first piece, “Perennial Measure,” it probably already became clear to me that the series would be about the practice of poetry and art. But after I laid that assumption down, thereafter trying to follow that course, I saw that I was actually able to create pieces that were also about various other themes, most obviously “Photographs of the Corrupt . . .” and “Importing Quiet Manly Ceremonies . . .”. After all, even the opening title piece itself, about the art of poetry, also already offers a satire—after Eugenio Montale—against the Fascist spirit. . . . With the collection’s progress, it was as if I was leading my reader through the many themes and issues that might confront a poet in his life and everyday world, qua poet. Still, so as not to veer too far away from what I intended to be the collection’s central theme, the collection would every now and again interrupt the constant straying to make me go back to writing another piece or pieces on the practice of poetry/art. And that pull from and push again toward the intended central theme went on to the end of the volume project (which initially targeted 56 pages worth of poetry text). And when I reached the 57th piece of my blogging, which all in all completed a collection amounting to 60 pages in the printed format, I said to myself, “yes, indeed—this truly became that book that I wanted it to be, about the art of writing poetry as a daily ritual.”

So, I say again, approach this collection as it pleases you. Yes, you may consider reading the last poem, "Perennial Failure," first, against reading the first one, "Perennial Measure," first. That's also okay.

Perennial Measure

(c) 2009 Vicente-Ignacio Soria de Veyra. All rights reserved.

Perennial Failure

1.

The poet. He not only lives awake on the page

Nor on the edge of an eyelid fuming with colors

And passionate birds of memory and the present

Beautiful lake in front of which he eats rice cake.

Those, sure, but in singing in his art, conscious

Of his own fart and part in the din of the streets

And screechy malls, his donation to the buzz of

Electrons in the daily grind of man’s wirings,

Communicativeness, he nests among cucumbers

Pickled with vinegar, then admires the inevitability

Of sour destructions. The beauty of form, godly

Dedication to norms and all divergences result

In a diary-like journalism involving minutes,

Minutiae and minuscule eruditions of corruption,

Consequent calamities and lost funds. Last to know

He promises not to be, to the least knowledgeable

He swears to deliver both music and company,

Chanting rhythms, prancing among rhymes, yea

His way to your information, disgust declarations,

Social dysfunctions, sleaze, his pen scratching,

All this while retracting to the mine of blue lights

Upon lyrical objects of delight—the fights among

Pastoral ants, flights of fancy, flimsy odes, syllabic

Consonants—a perennial measure sailing, failing.

The constant battle. Pleasure versus the leisure

Of looting and abuse of power, assassination of

Dissenters, movement against political art, decors

On the chest of collaborators, the “meat” of art,

Without which latter nothing but a music inside

The head, sans the politics of violins, sad guitars,

Notates the poem’s whole notes and not, like whole

Milk from absent cows. Dreams of snorers and

Those who refuse to believe that poetry is not

At all the art of the pedantic master of syllables

Or creator of stanzaic, worrisomely eccentric tics.

It is painting—with lines denying, crying verities.

2.

In the flood, he thought of saving all his manuscripts.

In his blood, and eyes, poetry awoke and floated to survive.

With Her Editing Work and Fineries

The lazy poetess, she said, with her editing work and fineries

is not one with us with our laundry and store-minding, said

the sister-in-law, and the former smiled with a sadness or

shivering awe: what canceling out by forgetfulness! What

crazy blues trumpeting its way into her busy hours’ hues they

measure not in terms of sweat but by no sweetness of words

communal in the flow of flaws. What’s she doing here? asks

now our young housewife. What else is there to suffer? is how

she’s at it now, knowing she must swallow ignorance as at a

preeminent palaver of mouths and its oft masterful hosiery of

truths enforcing new truisms that in turn manufacture hate that

she cannot now induce. She forgives the latter, being the freer

time farmer, to news dictators impossible to swing but simple

assiduousness to decided doers of the right thing, astoundingly

asphyxiating, sure, but can be patiently conscious, open like a

saint to the stonings and labels of that village train of thought.

And the sibilant injured by her existence can suffuse her on,

permeate her name with rusty chrome as Mrs. Negative-To-

Blame, but listen: if you need help with letters, ask her. If you

can’t ask her, don’t defame her. Please, envy-poetry poetess?

The Bullion Bouillon

The emergency fund that merged with the mercenary, waylaid by foreign trips fit for fiefdoms’ sheiks: what cheek! Then, the President, resident of government’s raison d’etre, Govinda to Jayas-Vijayas, made contingencies from the now-missing fund’s regency. Until one real emergency came along. Then the long faces, calamitous as clam in a steaming pan, frequented a feigned advice of support to supplant the tripping democratic trapping, the media with a view on representation. A representative revealed that yesterday became exhausted news of travels and tours, and trading in treachery bills. But the fund, the fund! It found its way into some appropriation, camp approbation, those sacred approvals and appearances, disappearances, sucking up, sucking our blood, though happily internationally bank-surfeited, according to a radio station’s rantings on statutes. The budget? The blues? Who would believe it was based on clues? A Commission on Audit was given the plaudits as one report resurfaced, but resubmitted as ripe rousing, speaking for the house, though copies of the report were soon resounded by one hiding mouse to finally secure an assistant commissioner’s assiduous auditing, or arbitration, or new indentations. We were so briefed like hell, ultimately shocked by the findings, shaking companies of shells with overspent billions, the bullion bouillon, that led to a near-declaration of emergency powers.

Ode to That Weekend

Morning. A fine, terrific brew would often smell nice, especially coffee to a bored weekender, specifically flavored to go well with scrambled eggs. But this one, rising to the seventh step of the stairs, was a witch’s potpourri.

Had septic odor, clay smell too, rust smell, bunker oil smell, and at church last Sunday, seven days after the rush, the pews still smelled of shit. Small mall of liquid shopping, with boots, I remember, the jasmine scent of detergent powder clashed with what came on like fresh saliva dried on a bus curtain. This is not a Neruda poem on the smell of cordwood or one about a shipbuilding company’s champagne gusts from striking a ship’s bow.

Ugh, she said. You need to write a poem about that visceral smell. And so I, vituperating no one, vaunted a “resilience” as an attempt, my rhymester’s nose in the air, stepping down my tower as if it existed. Holler if you need anything, she said, running to the third floor to breathe.

I scooped the floating pan for our morning egg-frying, washed it and my hands and feet with the soap atop the water container on our stairs’ seventh step, the soap fetched from the second-floor bath. Before this flash of a flood, I was in the shower thinking about writing an ode to the sunny-side-up and the aroma of arabica.

That morning. A nice, terrific brew would often smell fine, especially coffee to a bored weekender. I said, flavor it well today to go with all this scrambling.

A Poet Couple’s Perennial Measure, Modest Tea Aside (A Bonny and Clyde Variation)

This is it, an irresistible purge pure as putrid

Blogging . . . latching on to

Consciences suspended among the laundry.

Indeterminate was it for ten long years,

Cerebral, a radical conundrum with the flair of a behemoth.

Now things short, and not for the hell of posting some things,

A perennial incredulity, really a vow, to ourselves, to gods.

Your samovar’s fabulousness has come to town.

And so we say to you:

“We’re on a roll & won’t stop, won’t patrol a disgrace.

What now, what now? Dull are we in highbrow articulation?

So serious, our asses, and stage-struck?”

Let us unite, like-minded allies, let’s allow us freedom,

Though with grace, with braces of follow-throughs

Lest the crucifixes beget rock songs ballyhooed

To see gaping holes, toward a colon perhaps

Against our semicolon moves.

God’s only human, so:

The simplicity, his incondite monstrosities, . . .

Is that what we should get for being pretty “asses”?

Ha! They’re gonna love us when we’re gone,

Though still prejudged on campus by

Academicisms, ROTC militarisms,

Which we’ll remotely face like vandals at large.

From a living room desk to a black hole mess,

My love, do you remember?

A salary in celery?

An armchair faction?

One already contesting the shaking samovars?

My gods! And still a lad and lass at that in that dawning

Of a new day, with a compulsion to change the world!

“We’re welterweight enough for some sympathy, you know!”

Semi-Ode to the Urban Smell of Floodwaters

O climate change, your septic stalwarts braving

The rain as their tumultuous certificate of purity,

I owe you my liberation from intelligent pretense

Unto lost streets of cinematic realism and aesthetic

Fundaments, rechristening my erstwhile leprous

Fairness in these waters of neighborliness; grant

Me further mishaps and bankruptcies that I may

Be blessed with the contents of incomprehensible

Saintliness and charitable roars sharing my

Comeback, like a presidential candidate askew

And amiss about the abetted mud of crazy sanctity;

Pedal me forward like a bike against the current,

But allow me a smirk toward the contented jeers.

A jeep aborts a mission, a jar tangos to and fro, a

Jeremiad sings of a jalopy world of unrushed hours.

Whilst the floodwater, trash-induced and quite

The rat soup, rationally washes the world, with our

Trimmings and trappings stirred as fools’ food.

But I, being I, will see another day, improved again

Amid the litter, lesson unlearned, white again as

Paper freed from the tide of debris, urine, oil, garbage

Sauces, . . . back in the aroma of proud ink, letters.

Ode to Typhoon Ketsana

The azure absence has grayed to a movement,

Matutinal at best with hot chocolate and bread

But penumbral e’en to percolators boiling coffee

For the flood, the power outage, the silent TVs.

You come, stealthily as news on crackling radio,

Vague, vaunted, auto-validated, and the booms

And haze of your clouds’ early night fall on land

Like a cinematic effect for an effortless desuetude.

I embrace your charm as a child opening books,

Mimicking a howl to silence my fear, O teacher

Tough on lessons of modesty, faith, community,

Even forgiveness, gathering everyone to be one

To somnambulant swishes, long hoots, whistles,

And lashes. Like Jesus being prepared for a post-

Storm dis-carpentry, a suffering for a father’s eye,

His blood to mix with earth’s sweat, human sobs.

Each year, one beats us like a heartfelt Holy Mass.

In Dependence

Seven days

after the flood,

the mud-laden

garbage pile

squats

on the mud itself.

Marked

by all sorts

of dragged object,

this half-dry mud

records still

the confusion

of routes taken

by all the things

gathered there,

dragged there,

piled with a thud.

The thud

does not discourage

a mosquito from

humming around

a laborer child’s

twice-bitten ear,

nor the poor flies

from a tetra-pak’s straw.

The child hears

the mosquito’s violin

and is bit again,

but sleepy again

after a whole afternoon

of watching jeepneys

laboriously

go by,

gape,

shake heads.

She waits now

for the next

supper

ration

sure to arrive.

Sons’ and Daughters’ Oncoming Cold-Blooded Future: A Flood Warning

Flood. As we’re back in this gods’-dam and layered raincloud

situation, towns and suburbs usurped by power stations’ or

lumberjacks’ liquid money-making monkeying around with

our fate, witness others’ ignorance swimming in their

ignominious celebrations of survival. Sure we’re second-class

citizens in this republic of big business, but it’s the blindness

that’s made noble, tagged “resilient,” worthy of charity’s tics.

We, final pawns in these universal population-center

experiments, amidst foreign-funded projects programmed to

promote profundity in social relationships, have been like this

since time began. Some of us see in the mirror bleak souls and

black-fortuned witnesses to all the floating bodies on the

riverine shanty cracks of the pie charts. And we know that we

are here today as recipients of these instantly-promised

disaster-relief canned goodness by our forever celebrators of

popularity, our gracious hand-shakers with latent meanness.

Food! Fun time alternating with confusion, tension, the lines

chopper-instigated in this evacuation center march, colliding

with our cheers and the deafened religious chant from a

kneeling pew-less few. Here, forgetting loss of washing

machine witcheries, fridge responsibilities, TV temptations.

And the tours the chopper takes, from northern inundations on

to southern drownings, are fodder for these news media

-hugging camera smirkers, branding relief and the free

advertising as opportunity theirs for the taking. Then the faked

rantings of supposedly masses-friendly figures in a run for the

presidency, saddened by the drowned vote-buying potential

in that rising death count involving ghost-dike beneficiaries.

Flow. Fix nothing herefrom and allow evolutions to normally

glide, where parental patiences may give way to some time

future brimming with evacuee-like raving remonstrances and

rebellion. But, no worries, evolutions take centuries, and so let

us go on and build more cities, more dams, more creek-shanty

marketplaces. And labor forces, the rising red sap for family

trees of societal filial-relationship-like comfort, the steep

pyramid illustrating disposable citizenries, bourgeois middle

classes, and the plutocracy of dismal Christians sunbathing

like hell atop, their flood sliding down in a not-so-sorry flash.

Flaw. A fart in time will give way to a crevice in your voices,

o dambuilders, o undead unwilling victims, o still-moist ruins

on eternally-wet mud under peeking wide-eyed suns, our

sons’ and daughters’ rain-soaked, rooftop beliefs from

disbelief not anymore shivering from the ladder climb and the

evil cold. It’ll come in a “sorry,” read: not-so-sorry, flash.

Vita Su Un Altro Mondo

All right. To make my vocabulary simple,

I’ll only whistle to a bus’ sighs, permit my

Daughter’s flying kite to get near my 15th

floor terrace, Beatles singing “Michelle,” a

French stanza, I have yet to ask her aunties

when they’re coming back home, an island

to reclaim their souls here on my tiled floor

with occasional birds’ braving for cereals.

Okay. And my dictionary by the rails could

kill a baby passing on this windy morning,

with cable TV blaring its own phraseology

and very, very articulate criticism of art.

Have I forgotten reality? I write, fart.

Though True, You’re Now Respected, . . . Corporal, Son, Don’t Go

Scintillating, not. Daunting, yea, but. But:

do you even worry so horridly, bolting so,

almost frolicsome to the hilt? Would you?

Of course I’m being condescendingly tocky,

creaturely cute, curvaceous with my logic,

but that’s all because I’m now tragic, ‘kay?

Let’s focus on my lyric attitude: one arm!

Now, turn. Exhale some vapor, but burn one

vesper candle to those open mandibles! Hello?

Know, corporal, it’s true you’re now respected.

Restless, neglected. But did you see how lately

one socky white lady frolicked over corpses?

As A Househusband Brings a Weekend Breakfast-In-Bed Tray to His Pooped-out Working Wife, Not Yet Disturbed by Their 8-Year-Old Daughter Still With Her Dreams ‘Bout the Zoo

Scintillating frying consonance was here for you, my love.

As are butter now on toast, pink pomelo juice, instant coffee.

I have not bathed yet in the Tuscan tan of your chamber, love,

Nor have I yet found you. Nor the dryer, nor our petting zoo.

Did you hear her door open, floor watchfully creaking? She

Won’t smell semen, you won’t be sore or cry for heaven, mere

Scintillating assonance of words, love, is here for thee. And

Me. But let’s exclude me in the picture’s focus. Allure may be

The name of the game I’ll be playing onwards, but it won’t be

A lame dissonant perturbance encumbered with noisy, biting

Crustaceans. I may not have bathed yet for the danger of our

Daughter’s waking up, love, and I may now only be thinking

Of you, but I’ll soon take care of the laundry in the dryer, the

Cat/dog food in our zoo. Then wake Mia, our current focus.

A Selfless Self-Centered Attitude

You fail to see that all art is vain, and the artisan vainest of all,

unless he stays anonymous or hides by a plumed name. Then

our vanes cannot see the rain inside, there will only be this

shy glide of fortitude, an anonymous phoenix’s swoon to

vague borrowings, own sorrowing, or careening to ohs.

But don’t fail to see that all art is also finally owner-less,

the artisan a slave, even as he stays eponymous to his work

or arrives with a Moses cane, waning soon to be not actually

a bane to himself, but the boon to glad attitudes in helixes

crooning big arrowings, holy narrowings, caroming off arghs.

Today’s Reign of Dengue Rains

1. Remembering a very preventable past while worrying an unpredictable present

This is me, irritable jester from one time of cholera.

The suffering demands now a plastic confidence, right

in front of the fear nursed by a containment of past hates.

Containers leak a non-color there, letters from here, each

time pride fails. I could’ve betrayed a street-smart history,

as some last indian, snake from the grass out in a defensive

gesture, head up, a cup of venom boiling from the glands,

ready now for the next steady rampage of fellow snakes,

fellow proud jesters in this time of dengue rains, AIDS

lanes, A(H1N1) banes, cancer industry boons. I am,

loony crooner now fearing your doom, singing here

of past moody angers eager for remembrance,

longing for peace from that time of choleric

vomiting and insane sanitation-systems

greed, wishing for an encyclopedic eye

and a log of creeds to never ever see

those cramps again. But, by a

2. Recalling a researchable present while watching a helpless descent

strength measured by a credence, there

drops from the sky an image. Hitler with a

brush, from over the moon, Pink Period Picasso

with another woman, Dali with his Francoism, Liszt

with a theme jumping from mood to mood amidst crazy

fans, waking Michel Foucault in Mons and a later Buddhist

socialism. Michel became cross jester in the daytime, by night

time a sufferer of your jeers and judgments, you who have

suffered enough humiliation yourself in the envious

greed of these times of choleric jealousies, NTDs’

politics. Never will we see him again. Not

again, that historian of basic illnesses.

Ain’t I Verily Now Like My Führer?

Soap made from corpses on my witless idol’s

head, though true I may be- I’m syncopated.

Famously I glide along like old, old songs

familiar to Sinatra’s bobby soxers, but, yes,

crucified, while mollified. But it had to be me.

Not Santa but saturnine, too, red-flagged verily

too like the Führer, I get poked as my tribe’s

new chief as though it’s a new morning. Had to

be you? Oh I have to be free! Have to be, see,

to be wily again, to parrot again Charlie Chaplin.

English Easter

Even in England, fiery primates muse:

Easter Rabbit’s a pet, yet-to-be, being

postdated, your future guest, you in delirium,

it donning then various church company colors.

But really not the bird you fondly tag a cardinal,

it’d have the hue no Archbishop had dictated,

churches having focused more on the eggs,

the promised, not the promiser.

Ēoster must forget this prank, being

posthumous, set askew in the time of Lutherans.

‘Twas arbitrariness, the Bunny as the Virgin Mary,

among other meanings now put asunder.

But being critically liable, let the violins crank

up a future Voltaire among the rabble, against the

doctrines, fire up no heaven with a King or Queen

at St. George’s Chapel. This is all about

the Promise, not these promisers.

A Sergeant’s Wife’s Head On My Sleep-Deprived Shoulder on Liberated Corregidor: an Anti-War Confession

Non-alcoholized but sleepy, I’ve bestowed fervor

On the surreptitious, and so welcome back home to

Love. Sumptuously latent, though laughably/softly

Incredulous, am with the army still, the marinated

Fury, fomenting fearlessness, without ‘em noisy

Barometers for measuring men. With trepidation

Still upon humanity, kiss forgery awhile, crank up

Sonatas, pirouettes, and painterly history-data lines,

United winners feeling defeated, brandishing no

Enemy’s bandolier. “What the-?” went a woke,

Stunned, sad commander, seeing drowsy veterans

Kissing crying widows. “May their husbands R.I.P.!”

A National Artist Award Nominee Secretly To the Envied Award Winner

I am, like you, awash in a stream of pride and insecurities,

like you, co-opted by industries to present his tawdry human

résumé, account executive appeal, an enigma and/or shit

upon this earth that only wants to pretend life’s so pretty.

I am, like you, a corruptible artisan, willing to ass-bend

for someone’s fingering of my soul with books’ aesthetics,

patrons that we are to a common taste we lyricize as brooks.

With this Martian caliber of mine, I shoot a mirror’s smile

with alacrity, uniform praise being your ideal for proper

friendships, lordship that you are, avatar to an ego’s model,

filigreed film of a flatulent fornicator with fiefdoms, pre-

1780 Kantian diminished-rights non-criticality, your

astuteness put asunder, leavened bread to your fame.

Hunger, the plumbing for restless arts, carves sibilance

from acquaintances, rascals, even pederasts, lifelines to

aristocrats, and I sense endless abominable courtesies.

I am, like you, a waterfall of recurrent pride, insecurities.

The Myth of Religious Tolerance

Penumbral neoliberal libertarians. Noah’s seven laws.

Interlucate calls from intermediaries? Funerary! Infirm

Catechism! You loathe the candidate sewing ties to

Condoms and “lies,” saying, “surely there are other

Minds”? Let me broach other similar themes, provide

Antonyms and homonyms, that I may stay awake.

Southern lights, o scientific lights, make peace please

With the Christian hegemony. Oh, climate-changing

North wind, o silly wind chimes, ring me a bell for a

Fecund lecture-hall ceremony. Fight! Til the day we die,

We’ll be sibilant and flatulent both at the same time in

These hours of our lives, amour. Amour, yes. Amour I

Said as though we’re Catholic French, the long breads

We carried from camp to camp, silly as silly could be.

But no—we knew better, and so southerly we went

Toward Aussie bushfires, away from our northern

Druthers, me, you and my Pop art, forever and ever.

And where’s Amir? Amir, d’you remember? Christian

Crusaders were fencing with Moorish marauders, all

Fabulous, caricaturesque beauty for cinema! What

Campy creatures! Oh, I loathe candidates, ties with

Corporations, lookism! And lies! Surely these Other

Minds, debating, “will die”? Ahahahahahahahahaha!